Never change

In all honesty, The Man is right. I have changed. How could I not have? 

When we met I was fluttering around in the night life, in no any rush to graduate and occasionally temping in offices to keep those Cosmopolitans coming. Happy-go-lucky, carefree and not really planning ahead. In the next 6,5 years I found a steady but stressful job that I later on quit and moved to West Bank to work as a human rights observer. No stress there- there weren't much human rights to observe...

The experience was tough. Even my studies or years of anti-occupation-lobbying didn't prepare me for the conflict that rampantly raged inside me. The settlers harassing school children and throwing rocks and eggs at me, people being deprived of their most fundamental human rights... that wasn't the Judaism I'd come to know and love. That stint made me question many things. There were almost as much tears as there was tear gas.

After my return I couldn't find a job. My friends had been right- quitting your job in the midst of a global recession was a very silly thing indeed. So once again I upped my sticks and moved to Tunisia for an internship. Just in time for the Arab spring... Being away from The Man is always hard, but when your everyday life consists of curfews, running away from even more tear gas and witnessing demonstrators getting shot... that just makes it even harder.

Ever since my return I've been job-hunting, fighting for unpaid internships, trying to make the ends meet and struggling to come in terms with the fact that my entire life is all about waiting. Waiting for a job to materialize, waiting for the money problems to fade away,  waiting for all the volunteering to translate into marketable experience, waiting for feeling useful again... And waiting for The Man to figure out what he wants from me. I've had absolutely no control over my life.

Does all that sound like makings of a care-free, happy existence? Well no it bloody well doesn't. 

As determined as I have been to do my bit in making the world just a little better place, I'm sort of fed up with the way I still get treated by those local men. Why would I quit my job, leave my friends behind and choose to live in a developing world just so that I can be treated as a prostitute?! I'm still committed to campaigning for the human rights but have unfortunately become very disillusioned with the entities who'd have the real power to make a change. Yes, UN, I'm talking about you. You keep passing resolutions like diarrhea patients pass shit. They're worth as much as the resolutions I make each New Year; you know, the ones about me quitting smoking, drinking less, losing weight and learning farsi. Even I don't believe them!

So, yes- I've changed. Or maybe...evolved? Grown up? Essentially I'd like to think I'm still the same. That's not how relationships work anyway, is it? You don't make a pledge to stay exactly the way you were- you make a pledge to support the other person's growth and grow together, right? But even I know that I need to find some kind of a balance in my life. My current life doesn't give much reason for jubilance. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is working out the way it should. I find it difficult to be in the moment and struggle to find things to be happy about right now. I just don't know how to tackle that- all by myself.


At least before I still had The Man balancing my attempts to give to the world. He was the one thing in my life that was just for me, helping me maintain some happiness; enabling me to recharge. Now... now I don't even have that.